Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
What type of float tank should you get? Is one objectively better than others? How would you know? Graham and Ashkahn put their opinions out there on the debate.
Show Resources
FTS Product – Float Tank Comparison Guide (Free)
FTS Blog – Should I Have One or Multiple Styles of Float Tank?
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Today’s question is three words: “pods versus cabins?” Question mark at the end.
Ashkahn: Oh. Did it say three words in the question? Or you added that?
Graham: No, I added that.
Ashkahn: It was an editorial sort of …
Graham: It was much more editorial side, yeah.
Ashkahn: Okay. I mean, it added a nice kind of dramatic effect to it.
Graham: Yeah, thanks. I’ve been trying to kind of play up these questions a little bit.
Ashkahn: Yeah, we should edit everybody’s questions.
Graham: All right, so pods versus cabins. I guess we can just turn this into pods versus cabins versus whatever the heck other type of open tanks.
Ashkahn: Different styles.
Graham: Different styles of float tank, yeah. I assume-
Ashkahn: Hold on.
Graham: Yeah?
Ashkahn: Let’s maybe break down some of the vocabulary of the different words for float tanks or pods or all that sort of stuff.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: Which is partially that there is no strict vocabulary.
Graham: That’s what I was gonna say. We tend to use “float tanks” here at Float Tank Solutions, just as the generic term for float tanks.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: So we use that interchangeably for everything.
Ashkahn: But you hear … people call them float tanks, float pods, float cabins, float rooms, float chambers.
Graham: Sensory deprivation tanks.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Sometimes people will say those words, and they’ll just mean whatever. They’re just calling the general concept whatever the word they prefer. Then when you actually kind of look at the different sizes and stuff like that, I usually call them, I guess … tanks and pods I usually pit in the same category myself. Other people usually distinguish those between kind of their shape. But to me, it’s like low ceiling, high ceiling, totally open room are like the three categories I kind of piece them into in my mind.
Graham: Yeah, for sure. Honestly, different manufacturers will even call their units different names.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: So not only is there not an industry name for it. If you go out looking for all of the float cabins, for example, some of them might be called rooms, some still might just be called float tanks that are like tall-style float tanks.
Ashkahn: And then there’s like the Wave that is a cabin on one end and a tank on the other end. It’s pretty hard to actually firmly categorize these things.
Graham: Yeah, so don’t expect any kind of consistency in naming, I guess, when you’re going out there looking. But like Ashkahn said, I also think that there’s this smaller, lay-down-inside-it, smaller self-contained style.
Ashkahn: Like it’s the style you wouldn’t be able to fully stand up in.
Graham: Yeah. Then ones where you can stand up and ones that are just totally open and built-in.
Ashkahn: Yeah, like built into the room itself. The walls of your float tank are-
Graham: Are the walls of the room.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: All right. That said, I guess the question really is what one should I get? There’s just a question mark at the end, so I assume it’s like, what do you guys prefer? Something like that.
Ashkahn: This is a place where a lot of people have a lot of opinions. It’s a question we get a ton from people who are opening up.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: The nice thing is at our center, we have a variety and have had a variety, so we’ve kind of gotten to experience any category you can imagine. Open rooms, cabins, pods, tanks. We’ve had a slew of different types in our center. It’s interesting.
I would say, at the end of the day, ultimately I don’t think it makes as much of a difference as people think. A lot of people think it’s almost like a make or break decision for their business, in terms of what style they’re getting.
Graham: Right. We’ve seen so many businesses out there that are killing it with all old Samadhi tanks or Oasis tanks or something on the smaller side. And people out there who are killing it with really big rooms that are six feet wide and you can stand up fully inside them. Liners, no liners.
And for those of you who have actually experienced floating in a bunch of different units, you know as well, the experience inside is more similar than it is different for all of these different float tanks.
Ashkahn: Right.
Graham: I guess is just our term for it.
Ashkahn: It’s dark. It’s quiet. The actual amount of space inside that you’re floating … I mean, some of them are bigger than others, but it ends up not being that crazy of a difference.
Graham: I would honestly say that having the variety of tanks for me is more important than what that variety is. I really enjoy having a couple different types of units that we can shuffle people between.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Here’s kind of been my experience with our center is I feel like, if it’s someone’s first time, not always, but sometimes they’ll tend to look at the bigger units. They just seem slightly less intimidating, if you’ve never floated before. But that could also be because we have a variety, and they can actually look at one room and see a smaller one, look in another room and see a bigger one and be like, “Oh, I want to be in the bigger one.” You might not get that effect if people don’t have anything to compare it to when they’re coming into your shop.
But I’ll notice that people will gravitate towards cabin-style or open room-style a little bit more. Not everybody. Some people will see the more pod-like ones and be like, “Oh yeah, I’m getting in that thing.”
Graham: It is true. I think that our members end up floating more regularly in our smaller tanks than our first-timers.
Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s just the first time. Then once people float that first time, after that, I find it to be all over the place. People just tend to gravitate towards the different styles for their own reasons. I’d say a lot of people just don’t care after that. They float, and they realize that the shape and size and what it looks like is not of the most importance. When they book with us in the future, they won’t really care what float tank they end up in.
Or other ones, they just really like that more cocoon-like feeling in the pod versions, or they like being able to stand up as they get in and out. Sometimes they find some other feature of that specific float tank or that model. Maybe like it just holds temperature in a certain way that’s a little bit better, and they prefer it for that reason, rather than the size or the shape or any of that other stuff.
Graham: Yeah, and there really are people who just end up having their favorite tanks.
Ashkahn: Right.
Graham: Lots of times that has nothing to do with the tank itself. It’s more the experience they’d had inside there. It was like the first float, where they really broke through or kind of had crazy visuals, and now that’s their tank for sure. Every time they come back in, room three or room four.
Ashkahn: Even at the point where rooms three and four were exactly the same, I remember a customer who like only booked in room three, and I was like, “Oh, we have room four open.”
Graham: Do you want its twin next door?
Ashkahn: They’re like, “No, no, no.” Yeah. Once again, if you expected concrete answers on something like this from us, you’re looking in the wrong place. I do think that, once again, having a variety of units as opposed to a singular one is really nice. You can do cool things too, like if someone has a bad experience in a big, open pool, you can kind of say, “Oh, well, maybe you’d like something that’s a little more womb-like or something a little more contained.”
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: Kind of shift them over and vice versa. If they had a bad experience in the other one-
Graham: If we’re talking about variety, maybe a slightly different topic, but we should at least point out the downsides of variety too, which is that from operations, it can make your life more difficult. It’s basically that many more tanks that you need to have an understanding of. You need to know how the controls work. You need to know how the filtration systems work. You need to have a bunch of extra spare parts for all the different versions of everything that could go wrong and all that sort of stuff. It adds complexity to your business.
But I would say we get compliments on it as a center. People seem to like coming in and seeing that there’s a number of tanks to choose between.
Ashkahn: Yeah, basically it’s cooler for the customer, and I think gives them a reason to come back in, if they might not otherwise. If they had a bad experience in one style, there’s kind of this incentive to come try another style. It sucks on the back end. So it’s just a decision to make your life harder, so that your customers are a little happier.
Graham: Yeah, I guess, really at the end of the day, I would say I don’t think the difference in aesthetics or size of the float tanks matter as much as people think they do. I think you can run a successful business with any of them. I think the differences are how many customers you’re gonna gain or lose or whatever. Based off of that idea of the shape and size of your float tank is not quite as pronounced or significant as people think it is before they go to open their centers.
Ashkahn: Yeah, I would agree with that. So there you have it. A little more than three words for your answer. If you have any of your own questions and want to send them in, go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.
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In this post we’ll lay out a general process and timeline of what you may encounter on your path, from initial idea to actually operating a center.
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So you’re thinking about using volunteers in your float center?
Before we clarify what a “volunteer” actually means, we’ll first explore why a float center might be considering them in the first place. While it can be a way to provide floats to people who are otherwise unable to pay, the impulse to bring in volunteers can also stem from a desire to get some sort of free labor (later in this post we’ll dive into why you can’t actually do this, but it’s important to recognize that the instinct is understandable, especially when you have someone lined up and willing to work for free).
In addition to a desired boost in overall productivity, it’s also a way to invite more people into your center to experience what you do. Some customers actually want to help out and see what happens behind the scenes at a center.
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Broadly speaking, it’s a tool for homeostasis, an ideal environment that supports balance, health, and growth. This piece will look specifically at floating and athletics. For anyone who defines themselves as an athlete, or as a general pursuant of athletic endeavors, the float tank can be a powerful asset.
In this post, I’ll discuss individual athletes who float and how to look at this from a marketing perspective. I’ll also discuss past and present research, and share some thoughts on how the relationship between the athletic and floating communities might continue to unfold.
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I think it’s time we addressed the giant metaphorical elephant in the salty metaphorical room — there are lots of exaggerated and untrue claims about the benefits of floating being spread around the industry.
Some are anecdotal, some are only half true, and some are just patently false. Floating has historically had a strong oral tradition tied to it — the practice has survived through word-of-mouth, one passionate floater teaching another everything they know. The unfortunate thing about this is that the information disseminated can’t be reliably tested or shared with others on a broader scale. You can’t use “my buddy Chris” as a source for a health benefit of float tanks in a newspaper article, much less for a research paper.
Now that we’re becoming a bit more mainstream, we thought it would be nice to add some clarity to what we should and shouldn’t be telling people about these difficult-to-understand, saliferous containers.
